


Echo

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: AU, Gen, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-26
Updated: 2006-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:43:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Echo

It’s a box. Just a box. A place to put things and forget them, because you know they won't go anywhere.

Ten by ten by ten, smooth cold dark metal, the door fitted into the wall so that it barely leaves a seam. He traces the seam with his fingers to prove that it’s still there, when they don’t come back for ages. Or maybe it hasn’t been so long. There’s no way to tell. Time gets lost here.

A light comes on sometimes--maybe when he’s eating, maybe when he sleeps, maybe after so long a darkness, he's forgotten that it's ever been on before. He ends up curled in on himself and rocking slowly in terror, his mind entirely blank. He thinks that some day it won’t fill in again with color and noise. Maybe they’ll kill him before then.

If killing him is even what they want to do. He traces the scars on his body compulsively--arms wrists torso---checking that they’re still there. Those are proof. Those mark time. The track marks and bruises fade, but where they cut in and took things away--

 _I need to die._ He closes his eyes, rocks back and forth, hits his head against the wall. _Ineedtodie Ineedtodie Ineedto..._

Death can’t find him in the box.

“Don’t.” A hand settles on his shoulder and he flinches, startled. Bright blue eyes, staring at him from too close. Blue eyes. Familiar face.

Death can’t find him, but Lee Adama did.

“I need to die,” he says. His voice is foreign even to his own ears, a cracked and broken thing that lives in the dark. Lee shakes his head.

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

He rocks experimentally, and Lee’s hand comes up to shield his head from the wall. He stops, looks into Lee’s eyes, and tries to explain it again.

“I can’t leave unless you kill me.”  
***  
Lee didn’t want to go to the frakking Cylon ship in the first place.

This was a Starbuck mission, stupid and risky and best taken on without excess thought. It might as well have had “Kara” engraved all over it.

But the Admiral said no. The Admiral said “Lee, I need you to go.” The Admiral stared across the table with a father’s eyes and Lee’s heart tightened in his chest and he couldn’t say no, even though he wanted to. The _sane_ parts of him wanted to.

But he went. He crash-landed a barely-spaceworthy stealth pod on the Cylon ship. He slipped through the halls and passageways like a ghost. So far there was no sign that he’d been spotted, though he couldn’t believe that. It only made sense that if the Raiders were conscious, the big ships would be, and if they were all plugged in together, shouldn’t they all know he was here?

Maybe they just didn’t care.

He watched them, he took readings, he snuck around and played spy hero in the dark, and none of it was any fun whatsoever. It was terrifying and his entire body ached with tension, while the better part of his mind focused on nothing but the countdown to when his ride home would come.

And then he opened a door, entirely by accident, and stepped into a room like a box.  
***  
Daniel seems to fall asleep after a few moments, or at least he stops trying to bounce his head off the wall. He doesn’t seem to care that Lee never responded to his request for a coup de grace. Maybe he doesn’t remember that he asked for it. Daniel is crumbling around the edges and cracking at the seams. That’s to be expected; he’s been in this box for too long.

Daniel Iseth, call sign Ranger. Viper pilot from the Battlestar Atlantia. Lee even knows his serial number. He should; Daniel was his wingman on drill, slept above him in the rack, staked him at triad when he was short. Daniel was his friend.

Atlantia was destroyed with all hands. Atlantia’s Vipers had their brains scrambled and were plucked out of the sky.

All but one, it seems. Or maybe more--there could be others. Daniel doesn’t know. Lee should go and look, but he can’t; for one thing, the door won’t open from inside. For another, he won’t leave Daniel.

Daniel’s sleep is feverish and uneasy. He’s thinner than is right, even for a Viper jock making flight weight; he’s tissue-paper skin stretched over spun-glass bones.

Some of the needle marks on his arms are infected and weeping. There’s a gash on his face that has settled into a suppurating sore. It’s a Gods-sent miracle that Lee recognized him at all.

His eyes are closed, but he's not asleep anymore. “Lee. You have to kill me.” He is silent, motionless, for precisely as long as it takes for Lee to shake his head. “Please.”  
***  
They met briefly in flight school, long enough to know that they could push each other in the simulators and split the bar tab later. They wore the same uniform and liked the same kind of drinks and that was what it was. Training buddies.

On Atlantia it was different, but not by much. They laughed, they compared stories of R&R fraks and frakups. They covered each other’s back on drill and in the mess, making sure that the boredom-turned-nastiness of an idle military never got too unpleasant. Comrades in arms.

Daniel smoked pale blue cigarettes from Leonis, stupid trendy things, and he blew smoke through his teeth into Lee’s face when Lee made fun of them. He sang in the shower, off-key, dirty limericks set to the tunes of decade-old pop songs, and throwing stuff at him just made him take it up an octave toward falsetto.

He stepped out of the shower and turned to Lee at the lockers, dark hair plastered down wet across his forehead, and he smiled. Big damn smile like he had the Twelve Colonies at his feet. He arched an eyebrow at Lee in question and struck a dramatic pose right there, water running down his chest past his dog tags and tracing the line of hair down his stomach until it vanished into the towel slung around his hips.

“Yeah,” Lee said, because that was his job. “You’re gonna be a star, Danny. Absolutely.”

“Just as soon as I’m out of the Fleet,” Daniel said, swaggering over to his locker. “Bigger than Orpheus, I’m telling you. My most _modest_ plans are complete interplanetary domination. I’m going far, my friend, number one with a bullet--”

“The king of cliche,” Lee rolled his eyes.

Daniel grinned at him over the edge of the locker door. “If you ask nice, I’ll take you along for the ride. Whenever I get too full of myself, you can pull the trigger.”  
***  
He wants to talk, wants to tell his story fast enough that Lee will understand it, will _listen_ , will do what needs to be done. His voice is hoarse and raw in his own ears, and probably sounds even worse to Lee. He knows he’s not making much sense, but it’s so hard to put together linear thoughts, anymore. There are no lines in the box, only shadows.

“They take things,” he says, trying to break it down into small pieces, things he can explain. “They take blood, they take skin, they take--” He presses one hand against his stomach, covering the dark stain on what’s left of his uniform tank. Lee’s eyes track the movement, always so sharp, and he probably suspects what’s beneath. “They’ve taken everything, since I’ve been here. You’ve got to kill me before they take any more. Before they finish.”

“Finish what?” Lee asks gently, like he’s talking to a scared kid, and if Daniel could manage the effort he’d take a swing at him, the condescending frak. Lee pulls the water bottle from his belt, his ration for the mission, and offers it to Daniel like he has a dozen times. It’s against regs to share your water like that. Daniel won’t do it. He can tell it’s pissing Lee off, and if they’re in here for too much longer he might very well pin Daniel to the floor and force the nozzle into his mouth. That’s nothing to look forward to.

“You _know_ ,” Daniel says, and he’s glad to hear the anger make it through to his voice, anger that Lee the boy genius isn’t keeping up. “You said you knew. The Cylons look like us now.”

“Yeah,” Lee says, nodding slowly. “I know that.”

Daniel looks at him, trying to speak with his eyes, trying to get across that in this moment he isn’t lost in the dark and he isn’t crazy, he’s lucid and he’s _here_ and he means what he’s saying. “You have to stop it before they can look like me.”  
***  
“They perfectly mimic humanity,” Dr. Baltar said, looking anywhere in the room except at the people he was talking to, as usual. “Lieutenant Valerii took any number of blood tests without suspicion. The very fact that she’s pregnant shows that clearly the human-model Cylons are possessed of chromosomes. They have DNA that is compatible with the human, if not identical.”

“How is that possible?” the President asked.

“I have no idea. It’s quite extraordinary.” The doctor’s eyes twitched, and he glanced around the room again, fixing on something above Lee’s shoulder that seemed to amuse him greatly. “They must have some sort of cloning process. Remarkable biological technology. Extremely sophisticated cell and tissue-cultivation techniques.” He focused on Lee’s face then, for a moment. “Any data you could bring back on the subject would be most appreciated, Captain.”  
***  
“You don’t know that that’s what they’re doing,” Lee says, trying to keep his voice low, to sound calm and neutral, like he’s talking a jittery pilot down from space terrors or stims.

“What _else_ would they want with it?” Panic, and too many months in this box, are starting to overcome the sanity in Daniel’s eyes. “Why else would they be taking things out of me?”

There needs to be an answer, and it needs to sound good. “Maybe they’re just frakking with your head,” Lee mutters, then reaches out to grab Daniel’s hands when the man starts to laugh and thrash, slamming his head against the wall again and again.

“I’m frakked, all right--they frakked me up good, Lee--” Lee finally pulls him close enough to restrain him, wrapping him in a fierce hug and holding him still, and after a moment Daniel surrenders and goes limp, slumped against him with his head resting on Lee’s shoulder. “You have to let me die,” he mumbles, his voice muffled against Lee’s chest. “Please, Adama, I’m asking you pilot to pilot. Help me.”

Lee says nothing, just rubs Daniel’s back and tells the voice in his head to shut the frak up. The little voice that never stops, never backs off, is never frakking _quiet_ , the one that’s now pointing out the number of months that Daniel Iseth has been a prisoner, and now many Daniel Iseths could have died and been reborn and placed back in this cell in that time, and that Sharon Valerii wanted to die too, before she knew what she was.

The wound on Daniel’s face is leaving bloody marks on Lee’s shoulder.

“I can’t,” Lee says softly. He’s pulled the trigger too many times and he can’t do it again, not with doubt in his heart, not when he doesn’t know.

By now he’s probably missed his pickup. They’ll rot away in here together. Comrades in arms.

Daniel’s hands are cold even through Lee’s shirt, sliding down his body to his waist. It sends a shiver through his nerves before he realizes that Daniel is looking for Lee’s sidearm, drawing it from the holster. He catches the hand that Lee raises to stop him--a stronger grip than he should be able to manage, the way he looks, the way he is--and guides it down to wrap around the handle of the gun.

“You can,” Daniel says softly, and his voice is steady, his hands are steady, his gaze is steady as he meets Lee’s eyes. He moves Lee’s hands again, raising the gun up, pressing the muzzle to the base of his jaw. He leans forward so the metal digs into the soft flesh of his throat and he brushes a kiss across Lee’s forehead. “You can,” he says again. “You’re the officer here. You’re the Adama, it’s in your blood.” He nods slightly, the best he can with the weapon jammed there under his chin. “Please,” he says. It’s a command and a plea at once, and Lee’s hand tightens convulsively around the gun. “Lee--”

Sound echoes in the box. The sharp voice of the gun rings until the door opens and admits two versions of Leoben Conroy, who don’t have much time to be confused before Lee blows them away too and is running for where his ride might still be, if he’s lucky.  
***  
It’s one more mark for the body count, one more name to recall in the litany of the dead, one more splash of blood on Lee’s hands, and the truth is it doesn’t hurt anywhere near as much as it should. He has no hurt left in him, these days.

It hits him once in a while, sucker punches from Gods with lousy senses of humor. The echo of a shot when he walks past the firing range, the way the grip of his gun settles into his hand when he's cleaning it, the sound of a few of the little frak-up nuggets singing in the showers. They're aftershocks in his days, and he's almost used to it, because he's had aftershocks of Zak for years, and the Olympic Carrier, and the bullets hitting his father, and a dozen other hard sixes he's rolled and survived like the good soldier he is.

He just wishes he could’ve saved the dog tags. A memento mori for the grieving wall, so Daniel’s name won’t be lost when Lee runs out of time.  
***  
A Six enters the laboratory, where a Three and a Nine are peering into microscopes. “Well?”

“Attempts seventy-two through eighty-three were all flawed,” Three says. “We’re about to check the last two now.”

They leave the bench and move to a sliding window at the far end of the room. Opening it, they peer inside, studying the figure lying on the other side, tubes and needles running from it to the machines and monitors.

“Flawed,” Six says, as Nine tilts her head and frowns at the writhing, mewling mess. “Terminate it.”

“Eighty-five is the last attempt from this gene source,” Three says, as Nine pushes a button. The creature squeals, its colorless, sightless eyes going wide, and then is still.

Six nods. “There is always potential, if God wills.”

Three opens the next window. They step close to look.

The figure on the other side appears human. It lies motionless on its table, an empty shell. They watch for a moment, and Six shakes her head.

“It’s properly formed, but apparently the cerebral interface didn’t integrate--”

She stops. On the other side of the glass, the eighty-fifth experiment opens its eyes.


End file.
